1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to cross-system coupling and more particularly relates to the offloading of computing tasks from one data processor or processing system to another data processor or processing system.
2. Description of the Related Art
As is known in the art, special-purpose offload processors are employed to perform certain computing tasks more efficiently than a general-purpose processor or processing system. Such processors have been implemented as a coprocessor attached to a general-purpose processor which augments the processing capabilities of the latter to perform specialized operations such as floating-point, vector or cryptographic processing. Alternatively, the offload processors may be implemented as peers of the general-purpose processors in a multi-processing system, with the ability to run specialized tasks concurrently with other tasks running on the general-purpose processors. An example of the latter would be the zAAP and zIIP processor types in a z/Architecture mainframe system, which run under the control of the z/OS operating system but are confined to certain types of tasks such as Java applets and database queries.
In a traditional offload processor design, the general-purpose and the offload processors all run within the same data processing system, as defined by the same overall architecture, and under the control of the same executive. Such a tightly-coupled design tends to minimize communication latency, but also limits flexibility and increases cost by failing to exploit the wide variety of computing systems with differing architectures and price points that are available in the marketplace today.